When we are touched by something we are able to feel in to things beyond the limits of our personal education and by that experience and that by opening up to the essential imagination we also expand our compassion.
James Hillman (Wood, 2022: 93)
Spring Mandala: Self 2021
In this materialistic modern world, the function of our individual creativity is increasingly being placed under siege. Take for example British education where the growing necessity to achieve set outcomes threatens to dampen personal expression. Organisations like Ofsted enforce result tables as the key measurements by which we judge education’s success. However, there is an unnoticed flaw which ruptures this approach, it is the elephant in the room. The result is a chemical experiment that no longer works because a vital ingredient is missing. This is the nurturing of our imagination and the freedom to explore with it. The indomitable spirit of creativity holds a potent key to unlock our humanity so that we become reflective and develop compassion for others. Yet at the world’s peril personal creativity is being overlooked. To express the resulting dangers more poetically, it is the humanities that make us human. They open up a sense of possibility and bring meaning to our life. By ignoring imagination’s potential, we are more likely to fall prey to the growing tide of mental health difficulties. Gradually a new awakening to creativity’s efficacy has led to a back-pedalling so that for example GP surgeries have taken to suggesting a range of creative practices to treat depression and anxiety such as: be in nature or engage with art and music to charm away the internal troubles of the soul. These are the practices of ancient shamans, the healers.
Indian Church: Emily Carr
In the dense lush forests of British Columbia a hundred years ago, the Canadian painter Emily Carr not only recorded the last dwellings of the indigenous Native Americans on the Pacific coast but she also embodied the quality of their interaction with their landscape by employing her imagination. The resulting paintings portray something far deeper than the surface of the scene. They are a visual manifestation of the collective unconsciousness.Further down the Pacific coast at Esalen, Big Sur, CA, the ancient Esalen tribe used to visit for sweat lodge ceremonies on the cliffs. Here, sulphurous hot springs meet the sea’s crashing waves and sea otters convene near the shore to gorge themselves by cracking open abalone shells with stones on their chest. Meanwhile on the horizon sometimes orcas and grey whales can be heard singing. Millenia later Jack Kerouac took refuge in a shack on the water’s edge and generated an unsurpassed stream of consciousness of delicate brilliance in On the Road. Today the site hosts the Esalen institute where you can reflect inwardly through interactive courses in the arts and self-development http://www.esalen.com/. I presented creative music workshops there for ten years with my composer/cellist husband, Michael Christie. Further still down the coast in New Mexico at http://www.rancholapuerta.com/ I received instructions from a shaman as to how to lead sacred prayer flag making ceremonies and develop my Sound Healing practice. https://youtu.be/PJtJcNeIBEA .
Moving inland to the Rocky-mountains of Canada at The Banff Centre, one of my most significant early creative teachings I received came from a week working with the iconic American composer John Cage. He chose his extraordinary piece ARIA for me to perform. We laughed our way through the week exploring a range of playful approaches to this improvisatory work. His mischievousness set me on an eternal trip of joy. Together we metaphorically drank the champagne of alchemical creativity without a clue as to what would happen!
All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing.
John Cage (Larson, 2012: 239)
This synchronistic encounter with Cage went on to inform the pathway of my whole creative life so that my recent PhD research which I completed in 2020 led full circle to my syncretic practice of Art-Sound-Installation. In this crossing-over of art forms, I compose music, devise soundscapes, make film, create three-dimensional installations and incorporate improvised voice and dance performances. You can see a sample of this in my piece HER BODY commissioned by Tête a Tête Festival 2021: https://vimeo.com/615142400.
Photo: Claire Shovelton
I was inspired to make a fusion of these practices because of Cage’s far-reaching associations with creatives in other art forms such as the artist Rauschenberg and the dancer Merce Cunningham. The process took me decades to arrive at and came about in a way as Jung describes, “I began to understand that the goal of psychic development is the Self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the Self.” Cage was deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism which empowered a creative approach that allows work to manifest. The American composer John Adams describes the process
John Cage was also instrumental in making me comfortable and in tune with new technology. His playful yet disciplined approach to objects of twentieth-century life like radios, loudspeakers, microphones, tape-recorders and even computers had for me the effect of empowerment. He gave me the courage to see technology as fertile terrain for creativity.
(Adams, quoted in Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008: 20–24)
In Mary Antonia Wood’s newly published book Reimagining Creativity and the Call to Create, she re-contextualises the concept of creativity as a calling to every person, not just to professional artists. In other words she suggests that it is everyone’s birth-right and necessity to be creative. This can be expressed in a multitude of forms ranging from engaging with the humanities to being in nature or even simply cleaning one’s home. Mary Antonia suggests that creativity has been appropriated by capitalistic patriarchal systems much in the same way that religion tends to distract from the aims of deep spiritual engagement. In response to this Universal calling, as part of my creative portfolio, I run workshops that incorporate art, music, story-telling, sound healing and ceremony. This summer at www.skyros.com I observed with pleasure the bubbling creativity available to all during my Dynamic Beach Art Course. There were participants ranging from professional artists to young people and the creatively shy. In the workshop we gathered driftwood and stones from the beaches and like Rauschenberg transformed them though the power of ceremony and imaginative practice so that
‘the objects not only suggest new possibilities, things I would have never thought of if I’d stayed in the studio - they also set up resistances that I find very useful.’
(Rauschenberg, 2017: 235)
I find the insights of James Hillman particularly helpful for accepting the messy and sometimes perplexing process of engaging with one’s unique creativity. He explains how creativity can have a deep impact on our daily life by delivering refreshment and deep meaning even through simple pursuits. Jung’s play with stones at the edge of the lake, where he built towns and castles, comes to mind for its remarkable restorative effect during a six year period between 1913 and 1919 when he struggled with his “confrontation with the unconscious”. Jung literally engaged with his creative play to such an extent that he found himself embarking on a shamanic journey of disorientation, descent and re-birth. This period in many respects was the ultimate making of him. By posthumously sharing his deepest insights and bizarre fantasies in his black note books and ultimately The Red Book, we are liberated to allow ourselves to imagine. This creative play is of a totally different order to the nineteenth century model of artist as hero in order to be psychically creative.
If we imagine ourselves engaged as artists in life, it we use artists as our models …. then we would work with the daily mess of our lives as the material for psychological creativity...I want to get far far away from creative in the romantic sense. What I mean is having gratitude towards what one is given, for out of that makes one’s life, or to say it directly: You don’t have to become creative because the psyche is already that: right in its mess there is creation going on. The artist fantasy of oneself accepts the mess, likes it, needs it
James Hillman (Wood, 2022:96)
In my practice as a composer I want to also engage with all of the arts as part of my practice. This inevitably leads to me being described as a polymath, which can carry a sense of ridicule because there is a pressure in modern society to conform and specialise in just one thing. However, this approach shuts down creative thought. Yet I am encouraged by how some composers have painted, like Schoenberg, and some painters have been deeply involved with music, like Paul Klee. To conclude, being an archetypal artist involves everyone allowing themselves to be creative daily in some way. It doesn’t have to be something thing we would necessarily associate with being an artist. It could be arranging flowers, cooking, gardening or whatever takes your fancy. Or it could be taking a delight in nature. Recently I returned from five weeks of facilitating at Skyros and I kayaked and swam in the bay of Atsitsa daily. Here to finish is the feel of it.
Shaman: Self 2021
SEAWOLF
The waves were now lapping in her body, they had a soft but urgent feel like the tug of a lover. Her soul had become a part of the bay which sang in gentle over-tones. She was in some sort of tantric bliss, a total release from her cares that she had never felt before. A letting-go. A sense that no matter what, this bay would still be here for millenia and that she was a part of it. Seawolf swam out into the centre of the bay. The saltiness of the sea was so intense that it virtually lifted her out of the water so that she was a flying fish. Deep beneath her, the subterranean depths hummed with infinite blues and jade streams of filtered sunlight. The sea had become her mother and her fathers impregnated in the rocks, watched over her from the stratered cliffs.
She swam into a cove and landed. This was the part of the cliff face where her dead analyst lived. His strong bald head was tilted to the right side in a pondering pose. He knew the secrets of her soul and even though long dead from this planet, he spoke to her heart directly and honestly in loving tones. He had helped her become the Seawolf that she was. The wolf of the sea, a Mediterranean Viking of no fixed aboad except possibly this bay. This bay located on a far-off Greek island in the Aegean sea.
References:
Adams, J. (2008) Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Hillman, J. (1983) Interviews; Conversations with Laura Pozzo on Psychotherapy, Biography, Love, Soul, Dreams, Work, Imagination and the State of Culture. New York, NY; Harper and Row.
Kerouac, J. (1957) On The Road. Viking Press, CA USA.
Larson, K. (2012) Where the Heart Beats. New York: The Penguin Press.
Rauschenberg, R. (2017) Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Publishing.
Wood, M A. (2022) The Archetypal Artist: Reimaging Creativity an The Call to Create; Oxford, UK; Routlege.
